Tears danced in Bramwell’s eyes as he looked at his father. “After school some of the boys called me a Holy Roller, and when I didn’t reply, they picked me up and banged my head against a tree in the school yard. I lost count after they had done it eight times.”
William reached out and put his arms around his oldest son. “We must all be prepared to suffer for Christ’s sake,” he told him. “One day you will see that it is an honor.”
That night, after Bramwell was washed and bandaged, William and Catherine sat in the parlor for a long time. “There is no doubt the children are having an unusual upbringing,” Catherine said, “and I suppose we can only expect they will bear some of the burden for our calling. After all, you come home with cuts and bruises many nights yourself, and I am billed as the ‘Amazing Female Preacher.’ As much as it pains me to see them suffer, God has called us to follow Him, and that does not stop just because we have six children.”
William agreed. Anyone who spent an hour in their home had time enough to observe that every aspect of their lives was related to their Christian beliefs. William smiled as he thought about the burned-out hollow in the nursery table—the result of repeated “burnt offerings” the children enacted as a way to dispose of their broken Noah’s ark animals. When their nanny was not watching, they lit a fire in the center of the table and ceremoniously burnt any animals that were broken beyond repair. And there was the time William crept into the nursery to see Ballington playing at being the preacher. Ballington’s sisters Catherine, whom everyone called Kate, and Emma were the congregation. Each girl held two dolls and pretended they were crying and fussing. Ballington turned to them and commanded, “Take those babies out of the theatre.”
At that point, Kate said with smug satisfaction, “Papa would not have stopped—he would have gone on preaching and let the babies cry!”
William retreated, chuckling to himself. Neither he nor Catherine lectured the children about religious matters, but each child was working out his or her own role in a family of preachers.
William encouraged everyone who was converted through his preaching to go to a nearby church. There were plenty to pick from—St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, or All Hallows—but the inhabitants of the slum would not go to any of them. Some complained, “The likes of us are not welcome there,” or “We stood at the door, but the deacon told us to go around to the back and sit on the vestry steps, where we could listen to the sermon.” Others offered excuses: “Me sisters and me don’t have a Sunday dress between us, and our pa’s never had a collar on in his life.”
This concerned William. He knew that the people were telling the truth. After all, he had not forgotten what had happened years before when he had tried and failed to introduce poor people to his own congregation back in Nottingham. But if those who attended his revival meetings would not go to an existing church, what would become of them? Who would help them read the Bible and grow in their new Christian lives?
William had no answer to these questions as more and more converts kept coming back to the revival meetings instead of attending established churches. In fact, so many people were coming that by November 1865 the dance hall was too small. William hired a warehouse on Three Colts Lane in which to hold his meetings. This was a huge building with high windows and no insulation. Inside it was freezing cold in winter and stifling hot in summer. One of the causes of the heat in summer was having to leave the windows shut. This was because of the steady stream of projectiles that were hurled into the meetings from the outside, mostly by unruly boys. On one occasion, seeking to disrupt a meeting in progress, several boys set a match to a trail of gunpowder. The flare from the powder set the dress of one of the women in the audience aflame. People rushed to her aid and beat out the flames. Despite these attempts to disrupt his meetings, William Booth remained resolute. He used the story of the woman with her dress on fire as an illustration for a sermon, and through it all he kept preaching.
As December rolled around, everyone waited for the arrival of the newest Booth baby. William was delighted when Evangeline was born on December 25, 1865. He joined Catherine in a prayer for their new baby daughter, and then he wrapped the baby in a blanket and carried her out to show the other children. They were in the middle of breakfast, though three-year-old Herbert had climbed down from his chair and was peering with awe at the snowy scene outside. “Come and look,” William said tenderly to the children. “Here is God’s Christmas gift to us.”
“Is it a girl or a boy?” Ballington asked.
“It’s a girl,” William replied, “and we are going to call her Evangeline, or Eva for short.”
“After the Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin?” Bramwell inquired.
“That’s right. I can’t think of a better name than that, can you?” William said.
Everyone took a turn holding the new baby, and then William carried her back to Catherine.
Baby Eva thrived from the beginning, and soon the older children were carrying her to William’s meetings. Sadly, by this time it was obvious that eighteen-month-old Marian had been permanently damaged by her earlier bout with smallpox. She suffered from fits and was not as mentally alert as the older children had been at the same age.
William now had sixty loyal followers who helped him run the revival meetings and counsel and encourage the growing number of converts in their new faith. Most of these loyal followers were from the ranks of the poorest Londoners, but several were men and women of influence. One such man was a young medical student at London Hospital named Thomas Barnardo. During 1865 he had often helped William with his indoor meetings, but as 1866 dawned, he told William he was leaving to open a home for homeless boys in Stepney.
William looked into the determined eyes of the young man and said, “You look after the children, and I’ll look after the adults.” He clapped Thomas on the shoulder and added, “Then together we’ll convert the world.”
William meant what he said. Although he now had sixty loyal followers helping him and people were coming forward at every meeting to become Christians, William still had a long, long way to go to reach his goal.
Chapter 8
A Growing Work
William chuckled as he opened the East London Observer and spread the newspaper out on the table. “Come and look at this, Catherine!”
“What is it, William?” his wife asked, carrying Lucy, the latest addition to the Booth family. Lucy had been born just months before, on April 28, 1868.
“It’s about my work,” William said. He read the article aloud:
This gentleman has for some time past occupied the Effingham Theatre on Sunday evenings as a preaching place, and enormous audiences have been drawn to listen to his exordiums by the somewhat plagiaristic announcements of “Change of Performance” and “Wanted! 3,000 men to fill the Effingham Theatre. The Rev. William Booth will preach in this theatre on Sunday evening next!”
The result of so novel a promise as a change of performance, coupled with a formidable body of people marching down Whitechapel Road singing, we are bound to say with not the most melodious of harmonies, no doubt drew many persons who might even now be ignorant of the exact kind of “performance” so vaguely shadowed forth by the bills. The boxes and stalls were filled with as idle and dissolute a set of characters as ever crossed a place of public resort.
“That’s not very complimentary, is it?” Catherine said.
“Probably not! But what does it matter?” William replied. “It’s all free publicity. I don’t care what they say about me as long as they say something—and announce where I’m preaching.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Catherine said, and then with a chuckle she added, “and some of those billboards you use are eye-catching. Didn’t I see Bramwell wearing a sandwich board last Sunday that read, ‘Come drunk or sober’?”
“It was his idea,” William retorted in mock indignation. “Kate had one that read ‘Come Early to Get a Seat!’ And that was her idea too. I think we are finally starting to make a mark—a small one, mind you, but a mark.” He looked at the newspaper once again; “‘…filled with as idle and dissolute a set of characters as ever crossed a place of public resort.’ Those are just the people I am trying to reach—the more idle and dissolute the better. None of the churches are reaching out to these lost souls. They are my people, Catherine, my people.”
A week later a more favorable article appeared in the Nonconformist. William read it aloud to Catherine:
The labouring people and the roughs have it [the theatre]—much to their satisfaction—all to themselves. It is astonishing how quiet they are.
There is no one except a stray official to maintain order; yet there are nearly two thousand persons belonging to the lowest and least educated classes behaving in a manner which would reflect the highest credit upon the most respectable congregation that ever attended a regular place of worship….
Mr. Booth employed very simple language in his comments…frequently repeated the same sentence several times as if he was afraid his hearers would forget. It was curious to note the intense, almost painful degree of eagerness with which every sentence of the speaker was listened to. The crowd seemed fearful of losing even a word….
There was no sign of impatience during the sermon. There was too much dramatic action, too much anecdotal matter to admit of its being considered dull, and when it terminated scarcely a person left his seat, indeed some appeared to consider it too short, although the discourse had occupied fully an hour in its delivery.
“This is our year, Catherine, I know it,” William said. “We are on the move!”
And so they were. By the end of 1868, the East London Christian Mission, the organization William had formed, now had thirteen “preaching stations” (though he had to admit that some of them were nothing more than a permanent presence on a street corner). Some of the newest stations included the Oriental Theatre on Poplar High Street, a large shop on Hackney Road, and the New East London Theatre in Whitechapel. Various mission preachers held 140 revival meetings a week. Altogether there were seats for eight thousand people at these services. And since many of the venues held more than one meeting a week, William estimated that over fourteen thousand people were coming through the doors—or tent flaps—of the East London Christian Mission every week.
By now the revival meetings had branched out to include many other activities that William saw as essential to getting men and women out of abject poverty. These activities included evening classes in reading and writing, mothers’ meetings, religious tract discussion groups, temperance rallies, and soup kitchens. William intended to reach the whole person and help pull him or her up from whatever depths the person had sunk to.
William even launched a lively sixteen-page monthly newsletter to inform people about everything that was going on. He called it the East London Evangelist, and it carried eye-catching headlines, including “A Raging Mob Defied” and “Lob Those Rotten Apples!”
At the end of a busy year, William and Catherine decided it was time for the family to move yet again. A new church was being built beside their existing house, and Catherine found the constant banging of hammers and yelling of the workmen unbearable. The Booths’ new address was Belgrave House, Number 3 Gore Road, Hackney. The three-story house was surrounded by a brick wall with iron railings, and across the road was Victoria Park. To help pay the rent on the place, the Booths took in two women lodgers.
Christmas Day 1868 was upon them soon after the move to the new house. William preached in the morning, but he knew the children were waiting eagerly at home to open their presents. However, by the time he had walked home through the grim streets of East London, his own Christmas spirit had evaporated. He went inside and sat silently by the fire.
